Mississippi (2 of 5)
by Foxsong
Summary: Love, death, the Consortium, and people who are not what they appear to be. **2001 Spooky winner.**


Chapter Seven

Mulder hated to think of any day as wasted, but this one, he had to allow, was coming awfully close. 

Their morning spent poking around on the riverbank where Charles Vaccaro's body had washed up had yielded nothing. Now Cecelia Vaccaro was just showing them to the door after what had proven to be a largely fruitless interview. When Mulder's cell phone rang, he said, "Excuse me," and stepped through the doorway onto the porch, leaving Scully inside. 

"Mulder."

"Hello, Agent Mulder? Jim Cormerais."

"Sheriff. What can I do for you?" Mulder stretched his long frame, glad to be standing again; Mrs. Vaccaro had meant well when she brought out the coffee and cookies and led them into the living room, but the overstuffed couches had obviously been designed for people who meant to sink deep into them and be enveloped, unmoving, for a long evening of channel-surfing. It had required a conscious effort to unfold himself when he got up.

"You were in the right place, all right, but your timing's a few hours off," the sheriff was saying. "I think we've got a new one for you."

Mulder frowned. "Another victim?" 

"Sure looks that way," Cormerais returned. "Couple of kids playing hooky from school spotted him -- got themselves good and scared. Anyway, we just fished him out, and he's got the same kind of stab wound to the back of the neck."

"Huh," Mulder said, gesturing to Scully as she came out onto the porch with Mrs. Vaccaro. "Anything there to see?"

"No more than last time," the sheriff sighed. "He started somewhere upriver and just ended up here. Soon as my people are done, we're heading back to the morgue with him, but of course you can run by here again if you want."

Mulder wandered down the stairs. "I'll ask Agent Scully, but she'll probably just want to come have a look at the body." He turned to look at her and saw that she was just taking her leave of Mrs. Vaccaro; he recognized the wave of her hand in his direction and knew she was excusing him as well. "We'll catch up with you."

"Well, you know where to find us. We'll see you later. And that dinner invite still stands, you know."

"Thank you, Sheriff." 

Scully appeared at his elbow just as he was snapping the phone shut and replacing it in his pocket. "How's the back?" she asked with a knowing smile.

"That wasn't a sofa. It was an upholstered amoeba," Mulder snorted as he slid into the car. "And here I thought you were just being ladylike when you perched on the edge of the thing like that." 

"Whereas you, on the other hand, sat down and found yourself engulfed by its pseudopods." She settled in beside him and reached for her seat belt. "Who was that on the phone?"

"It was the sheriff," he said, turning the key in the ignition. "They just took another one out of the river."

Scully looked up sharply. "Another victim?"

Mulder nodded. "They'd just pulled him out when Cormerais called me."

"Matching the pattern of the other three?"

"He thought so. As soon as the CSI are done at the scene, they're heading straight to the morgue with him." 

"Well, there goes dinner," Scully said bleakly. "Nothing against your beloved truck-stop fare, Mulder, but I was looking forward to this much-vaunted Cajun food." She folded her hands in her lap. "I guess I can talk to Dr. Dennison tomorrow," she added, almost under her breath.

"About the autopsies?"

"Oh," she said, seeming surprised he'd heard her last words. "No, I concur with her findings. She was very thorough."

Mulder glanced over at her. "You said you remembered her name -- from a case? It wasn't anything of ours."

She sighed, looking away toward the window, and Mulder wondered for a moment whether he'd unwittingly committed some kind of faux pas again. "I mean, I don't remember it, anyway," he ventured.

"It wasn't ours, exactly," she said. "She wrote a report that I studied at some length. I thought it might have some bearing on a followup."

"A followup to...?"

Scully was quiet for so long that he was almost sure he'd overstepped one of her unseen boundaries. He risked a sidelong look at her; she so seldom gave him words to go on at moments like this that he'd become adept at reading her physical language. She was only gazing down at her folded hands; her head was tilted to the side, bowed down a little at the end of the smooth curve of her neck and back, and Mulder breathed a sigh of relief as he knew he'd escaped an argument this time.

"Dr. Dennison wrote a short paper," Scully began, "on her unusual findings in the case of a small girl who was reported missing by her adoptive parents and who was left by persons unknown, near death, at a hospital emergency room two weeks later." She raised her head, her eyes focused somewhere on the dull terrain outside the windshield. "She failed to respond to any kind of treatment. She died within a week." 

He wasn't sure what he had expected, but it had been nothing like this. He considered pulling over, but Scully was still staring fixedly ahead, and he decided maybe she found it easier to recount these horrors without having to meet his eyes. He kept driving.

"The child's mother made repeated charges of abuse against the father, but they were so extravagant and improbable that they proved impossible to substantiate," she continued. "The father was a high-level medical researcher involved in a government-sponsored project. The local law enforcement agencies were very quietly relieved of the case." 

She had adopted the dry, detached tone she reserved for relating the details of a case to another professional; that, more than anything, told him how it hurt her just to say it. "Scully..." he murmured, but she shook her head and went on. 

"Dr. Dennison found evidence of bizarre genetic mutations in her initial tests on the blood and tissue samples that were collected from the body. She at first proposed that they were viral in origin, and that they were the cause of death, but then theorized that the girl's body had been functioning optimally until that point with the support of certain proteins that her system had somehow stopped producing."

"Or that had stopped being provided for her," Mulder said grimly. "What did the rest of the tests show?"

"There were no more tests." Scully crossed her forearms around her middle, wrapping herself in a kind of hug. The gesture was at once so defensive and so forlorn that it made Mulder heartsick. "Both parents died shortly afterward in an apparent murder/suicide. All of Dr. Dennison's samples and lab work were confiscated. ... There were no more tests."

They drove in silence for a few miles. 

"You never told me about this," Mulder finally said.

Scully shrugged halfheartedly. 

"Scully, I'm..."

"I know, Mulder." To his surprise, she reached out and laid her hand over his and gave it a brief squeeze. "I know." And from the corner of his eye he watched her sit up straighter in her seat and don her invisible armor again.

Chapter Eight

Mulder was waiting in the hotel lobby when he saw the grey Cherokee pull up outside, and he walked out to meet it. As he came nearer, he saw Dr. Dennison lean across the seat and push the door open. "Hop in," she called, smiling.

"Thanks," he said, settling himself into the seat and closing the door. Fastening his seat belt, he glanced over at her, and then looked again. She wasn't wearing the glasses she'd had on earlier at the office, and her hair was drawn up into a soft French braid. A few gently curling locks had escaped to trail down her neck. Her dangling earring glittered in a passing shaft of light.

"It's just us tonight, I'm afraid. Jim got a call he said he had to take care of." She braked the Jeep at the edge of the hotel's driveway. 

"Something to do with our case?" Mulder asked.

"I don't think so," she said, shaking her head and frowning just a little. "He would've told me if it was."

"Well, Dr. -- " he began, but she lifted one hand from the wheel and waved it to stop him. 

"Please -- 'Paula.' For tonight, when I'm out of that office, anyway." She looked over at him and grinned. "Okay?"

"Okay. Paula." He nodded. "So. Where does one dine in the exciting urban mecca that is Donaldsonville?"

She chuckled. "One doesn't. One drives across the river into Burnside and goes to a place called the Cabin."

"You're the tourguide," he said amiably. "The Cabin it is."

"So," she said after a moment, "any thoughts yet on our fourth swimmer?"

"Not really. Maybe in the morning, when we have the autopsy reports." He inhaled carefully, trying to decide if the dark, spicy scent he caught every now and then was something she was wearing. It was very different from the one Scully wore, but it was nice.

Paula interrupted his little reverie. "He's kind of a break in the pattern, don't you think?"

"How do you mean?"

"I mean, he's not government." She tilted her head a little and glanced toward him before turning her eyes back to the road. "You had ex-Bureau, ex-State Department, and one ATF. This guy was just some kind of scientist."

Mulder shook his head. "There'll be a connection, but it won't be that obvious. Once I know the real relationship between the victims, I'll be able to understand what's on the killer's mind, what he's getting at. What he's trying to tell me."

"What he's trying to tell you?" she repeated.

"This killer is trying to tell a story," Mulder nodded. "When I learn to read it, it'll be there -- all of it. What he thinks was done to him to make him feel this way. The characters from his life that the people he's killing represent. He's acting out a drama that he can't express in any other way."

"Hmm," Paula said slowly. "Now that's a little different." Mulder looked over at her, at the way the lights of the passing cars caught her blonde hair and set it alight as they went by.

"You've profiled?" he asked.

"Not the way you have. I've always been interested, but I've only dabbled," she shook her head. "That's just intriguing. I've never heard it put quite that way before."

"Well, look at it. The bodies aren't disposed of in a way that makes them difficult to find. He's made no attempt at all to conceal their identities. He even left this last man's wallet in his pocket with all his ID."

"So what's he saying? Is it a dare? Or that he can't stop himself, and he wants someone to stop him?"

"That's how it strikes me -- that he can't stop. My instincts are usually pretty good." He sighed. "There's more to this one than I'd expect your people to see. My partner and I have... We're on familiar ground. I think I have some idea of what we're looking for."

Paula was turning the Jeep into the little parking lot in front of an unassuming building. "It's not fancy," she said, by way of introduction, "but if you want real Cajun food, this is the place."

Mulder got out of the Jeep. Paula was tall, and her stride was almost as long as his; he fell easily into step with her as she led him to the door of the restaurant. Remembering his manners, he stepped ahead and opened it for her.

When they walked in, she made a right and headed for a booth in the bar, rather than turning left toward the restaurant proper. "It's no-smoking in there," she said, wrinkling her nose, to his questioning gaze. "Unless you mind?"

"No, no," he said, "it's all right." She unbuttoned her coat, and he reached out to take it as it slipped from her shoulders. She was wearing a silky dark dress that fit just a little too closely, was just a little too low-cut at the neckline, to be businesslike. He wouldn't have guessed, from the suit she'd been wearing yesterday, that she had such a lovely figure. Mulder found himself staring and hurriedly looked away before she could catch him.

He hung her coat on the hook between booths, and put his own next to it. As they sat down, a waitress approached, and set two menus and two glasses of water on the table. "Hey, Paula," she said.

Mulder looked over at Paula. "You're a regular," he said, and she smiled.

"Maybe," she said with what might have been a teasing lilt. She turned back to the waitress. "What's good tonight?"

"The corn and crab bisque is great. So's the catfish couveon. There's a crawfish etouffee tonight, too."

"Hmm. It all sounds good," Paula mused. "Give us a minute, would you?"

"Sure," the waitress said, folding up her notepad. "Drinks?"

Paula lifted her eyes from the menu to catch Mulder's gaze. "What do you -- oh, never mind. Tonight you're drinking Hurricanes."

"Hurricanes?"

"It's a local thing. It'd be a crime to come all the way down here to Cajun country and not try a Hurricane." 

"Two?" the waitress asked.

"Sure, Honey. Thanks," she said, and laughed at Mulder's surprised expression as the other woman walked away. "That's her name. 'Honey'."

"You *are* a regular," he said.

She shrugged, and said "Maybe," again, and this time the way she held his gaze and smiled made him sure she was teasing him. He found himself smiling back, and then she dropped her eyes and began to read the menu.

She really was an attractive woman, he thought idly, watching her over the edge of the menu he was pretending to study. He'd never been able to shake his feeling that women were like chameleons, seeming to change according to their surroundings; sometimes he still felt oddly adrift with them. He felt that he could never quite understand what was wanted of him, however hard he tried. Even Scully, as long as he'd known her, still surprised him from time to time, and not always pleasantly.

A Hurricane proved to be an orangeish concoction over ice in a tall glass. It tasted innocuous enough, but Mulder suspected it was the kind of drink that would sneak up on him if he treated it disrespectfully, so he sipped cautiously at it over their appetizers.

At first they talked shop, and his mind turned again and again to the case Scully had told him about, but he couldn't bring himself to ask Paula about it. Emily and all the things concerning her had somehow become Scully's private affair in a way that few other things ever had, and it was unsettling to think this stranger might have some kind of insight that he didn't. The feeling was strong enough to make him hold his tongue.

As the evening grew longer, the conversation drifted to other things. Somewhere along the line, more of the tall orange drinks appeared, and by that time Mulder had forgotten his initial distrust of them. He had discovered that he was having a good time. Paula was pretty and clever, and she laughed at the right places in all his stories, and she looked at him as if she wasn't just stuck with him for the evening, but really liked him.

As the waitress finally set their coffee cups down before them, he said to Paula, "You used to work with the Bureau. Didn't it suit you? Is that how you came here?"

Something changed in her gold-flecked blue eyes, and he thought he'd made a mistake. She glanced away and tapped the ash from the end of her cigarette carefully into the ashtray before answering.

"No, I liked it. I would have stayed." She looked up, but not quite at him. "My father was dying, and I came back here to take care of him."

"I'm sorry," Mulder said. "I didn't mean..."

"No, it's okay," she said, meeting his eyes. "He really didn't have anyone else. My mom passed away when I was seven. There was a... a family crisis the year before, and she never got over it. My dad never remarried." She looked away, and picked up her coffee, and took a sip.

Paula seemed to be far away, thinking. Mulder didn't know what to say, so he drank a little of his own coffee, and waited.

"My dad was the reason I got into the Bureau in the first place," she finally said. "He was Bureau, and I was an only child, and I was kind of raised to follow in his footsteps." 

"That sounds like me," Mulder said, nodding. "My father worked for the State Department. I know how that is."

Paula looked up from her coffee. "Really. Only child, too?"

"Well... no, and yes. I had a younger sister, who..." He dropped his eyes and ran his finger lightly around the rim of his coffee cup. "She was abducted from our house when she was eight, and they never found her. So..."

"So when you grew up, you thought you would, and you joined the Bureau," Paula said with certainty, and Mulder looked up sharply. She met his gaze evenly. "Did you?"

Mulder, surprised, drew a long breath before answering. "I finally found out what happened to her. It wasn't the same as finding her, but it -- it helped."

Paula reached across the table and laid her hand over his. "It's the not knowing," she said, "that's the worst. Once you know, you can start to go on." There was an intensity in her eyes and in her words that he didn't know how to answer, and he was relieved when she withdrew her hand and the moment passed.

Looking at her watch a few minutes later, Paula smiled. "Look how late it's gotten. I'm going to have to take you back before my truck turns into a pumpkin." She waved him away from the check, handing her credit card to the waitress. "I can write it off. Don't worry about it." She signed the slip, and Mulder held her coat out for her, and let his gaze linger again on the errant golden curls of her hair that lay along her smooth pale skin as he settled the coat upon her shoulders.

"You know, I'm just going to swing by my place on the way back," she said after they'd driven a few miles. "Then you can take some paperwork I was going to bring to the office tomorrow, and get a head start. We practically drive right past there anyway; it's not out of the way."

"Fine," he answered, settling back against the headrest. He didn't want to admit that he was still feeling those Hurricanes. It was just that he hardly ever drank, he told himself; he wasn't used to it. The dark forms of the landscape rolled soothingly past outside the window.

He must have dozed a little. The Jeep was pulling to a stop in the gravel driveway of a little house; the crunching sound beneath the tires brought him awake. "Here we are," Paula said beside him. 

He opened the door, intending to step out and get a breath of the cool air, but when he did, he heard the murmuring of the water in the quiet of the night, and looked into the darkness beyond the house. "Is that the river? Right there?" he asked.

"That's it," Paula replied. Mulder walked toward it, cautiously at first, and then more surely as his eyes grew used to the moonlight. He crossed the yard and came to a low picket fence; perhaps a hundred yards on the other side, the land fell away steeply toward the riverbank. The moon's reflection rippled on the broad expanse of moving water.

"It's beautiful," he murmured. "Peaceful."

"Tonight, yes," Paula said softly beside him. "But I've seen her wild. I've seen her climbing these banks like a woman bent on vengeance. ... I've seen her kill."

He watched the way the white-gold moonlight shifted on Paula's hair. Her fingertips grazed his arm. "Come in the house," she said, turning, and he followed.

They went inside, and she turned on a dim lamp on a table by the door. She slipped her coat off and laid it over the back of an overstuffed wing chair. "I'll be right back," she said, disappearing down the hallway.

When she returned only a moment later, she was empty-handed. "You know," she said, "I don't see those papers here. I guess I brought them to the office today, after all." But she didn't stop to pick up her coat; she came past it, came closer to him, smiling mysteriously.

"I can pick them up in the morning," Mulder offered. Paula nodded, moving closer still. 

"Silly me," she said, lifting her hands and tracing the edge of his coat collar with her fingers. "I guess you'll have to." And then one of her hands was smoothing along his chest, and the other was slipping around the back of his neck, and she was closing her eyes, tilting her face up toward his, and drawing him down into her kiss, drawing him down, drowning him as surely as the river outside would have. As his coat fell from his shoulders, he reached up to take her into his arms.

He ought to stop her. He knew he ought to stop her. But, oh, it had been such a long time, and it was so easy to keep kissing her, so easy to let her keep loosening his tie, unfastening the buttons of his shirt; it was so shamefully simple to let his hand slip down to trace the curve of her hip as she pressed her body even closer to his.

He ought to pull away, he ought to take his hand -- the one that was, just at present, cradling her head, holding her near -- he ought to take that hand and close his fingers around her wrist, and tell her he couldn't, and ask her to drive him back to the hotel and to Scully. But his disobedient fingers had already undone the little clip that held the loose French braid, and they were letting her hair down, weaving themselves gently through its silky golden length.

He took his hand from Paula's hair, then, but instead of closing around her wrist his fingers closed on the zipper at the back of her dress, and just then he felt the buckle of his belt fall open, and Mulder finally understood that he wasn't going to stop her, not at all.

Chapter Nine

He was standing in front of the mirror, knotting his tie, when he heard Scully's peremptory rap at the door of his room behind him, and he closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath before answering. "It's open."

In the reflection he saw Scully open the door enough to lean in and smile at him. "Good morning," she said. "Ready to go?"

He fussed with the tie another moment, answering her image in the mirror. "Almost," he said, and then, because he couldn't think of a way to stall any further, he turned to face her. "Let's go."

They walked silently down the hallway. "I think I might have found something last night," Scully said as they stepped into the elevator, and Mulder's stomach lurched more than it should have from the feeling of the floor dropping away as they began their descent.

"Found something?" he asked. His voice sounded odd to his own ears.

"A break, Mulder," Scully answered, looking up at him quizzically. "On the case."

"On the case. Of course." The elevator made him feel claustrophobic. He was relieved to get out of it. When they came to the cafeteria he picked up a tray and headed off away from Scully and toward the counter, but though he lingered there longer than he needed to, looking over all the fruits and pastries, he couldn't find anything that appealed to him. He took his coffee and looked around, and Scully's red hair drew his eye like a beacon. She was making her way to an empty table toward the back of the room.

By the time he got to the table, Scully was settled in with her breakfast. She had a generous chunk of canteloupe and one of those bran-muffin things she liked so much. He wished he could eat.

She glanced up at him, her eyebrow rising into its familiar arch. "Just coffee?"

"I'm... not hungry," he said, sliding into his seat and reaching for the sugar, avoiding her eyes.

"Mulder, are you feeling all right?" 

Damn. Why did he ever imagine he could fly below her radar? He didn't have to look at her to know how she was watching him; her stare was almost palpable. In his mind's eye he saw the way she would tip her head just that little bit to the side; he saw the warmth of concern in her expression. He kept his eyes trained carefully on the coffee as he stirred the spoonful of sugar into it.

"I didn't sleep much last night." There: it wasn't a lie, and it wasn't so unusual, either. Maybe she'd just let it go. 

Looking down at the coffee cup, he didn't see her lift her hand and reach out toward him, and he flinched when she laid her soft cool fingers against his forehead.

She drew her hand back, and said, "Sorry," in a way that made him sure he'd offended her.

"I didn't see you. That's all." 

It had been so long since he had really tried to hide anything of importance from her that he scarcely remembered how. The peculiar alchemy of it seemed to turn him to glass; he marveled that she didn't just look up and see right through him to the stain on his heart. If she were to touch him again he thought he might shatter.

To his mingled relief and chagrin, when Scully set down her spoon, she only reached into her bag and pulled out a notepad. Mulder coalesced back into ordinary flesh and bone as she flipped back the cover and began to leaf through the densely scribbled pages. "I didn't get far, of course," she said, "but I've made what I believe to be an important connection.

"This Plevretes, that I autopsied last night," she went on, her eyes fixed on the page she was worrying between her fingertips, "had an employee ID -- a keycard, with a fingerprint scan -- in his wallet from a company called Crouse-Hinds. It only took one phone call to find out that he was a microbiologist on staff there, working on gene therapy. But the name of the place sounded so familiar, and I just couldn't shake it. I couldn't stop thinking about it the whole time I was working on him."

She glanced up from the notepad to Mulder's face. He cocked his head in what he hoped was a casual-enough curious expression, and waited. 

"When I got back to the hotel I got into the Bureau database and did a little digging. Between a few of our own old reports, and an educated guess, I put two and two together. Mulder, until just six months ago, the Crouse-Hinds Corporation was a wholly owned subsidiary of a company called Transgen."

Mulder's hand stopped short halfway to his coffee cup. His eyes narrowed. "Roush," he said, not brave enough to speak the other name.

"Emily," Scully said softly for him, nodding, closing the notepad. Mulder released the breath he hadn't been aware he was holding.

The enormity and the depth of the implications of that simple utterance of the child's name washed over Mulder, taking away whatever chance he might have stood of making casual breakfast chat. Instead he sat watching the precise way Scully scooped out little spoonfuls of melon, working methodically from one end of the rind to the other, as if it were a source of unending fascination. She didn't look up, and if she could feel his eyes on her, she didn't acknowledge it in any way. A little part of his mind was tempted to assign some dark significance to her silence, but he chided himself and told himself that he was imagining things.

At length Scully patted her mouth with her napkin and looked at her watch. "We should get going, Mulder," she said. "Dr. Dennison told me I could stop by and pick up some of the lab work first thing this morning."

"Oh," Mulder said. "Great." 

- - -

Fifteen minutes later they arrived at the medical examiner's office. Holding the front door open for Scully, Mulder helplessly remembered holding the door at the restaurant for Paula last night. He shook his head and followed Scully down the hallway.

It occurred to him that he had no idea what the proper protocol might be these days for greeting the colleague by whom one had been seduced the night before. Was an ordinary 'good morning' enough? As he was thinking, his hand absently sought its accustomed place low against Scully's back, and as he realized what he was doing Mulder snatched it away before it could touch her.

Scully knocked briskly at the office door and reached for the knob without waiting for an answer. "Good morning, Dr. Dennison," she said as she swept into the room.

"Good morning, Agents," Paula answered from behind her desk. She hardly looked like the same woman, he thought with a kind of shock, seeing her bright hair pulled back again into its demure bun, and her lithe figure hidden behind the severe lines of her steel-grey suit. Mulder met her eyes and smiled uncertainly, but the smile he received in return was polite and professional, and gave no hint of anything that might have stirred beneath its surface.

Paula rose from her chair and picked up a large yellow envelope from the corner of her desk. "Here are your radiographs, Agent Scully," she said smoothly, holding them out. Mulder watched Scully's right eyebrow rise into its familiar arch. As Scully took the x-rays, Paula picked up several manila folders. "And these are your preliminary lab results. The full tox screen will be in sometime before noon."

"Thank you very much," Scully said. Mulder looked over at her and saw that the left eyebrow had joined its sister, softening her whole expression. "I must admit I really hadn't expected to have all of this so soon this morning."

"When I called the lab yesterday afternoon," Paula said, "I just told them to treat anything of yours the same way they'd handle something of mine." She sat down behind her desk again, and looked up with a smile that might have been a little bit smug. Mulder thought it was just as well that Scully's attention was engrossed in the paperwork and that she missed it. 

"I also took the liberty of doing a little of the legwork on Dr. Plevretes for you." Paula reached over and took a paper from the tray of her printer. "He lived alone in Natchez, across the state line in Mississippi, but his ex-wife is in Port Vincent, a little less than thirty miles from here. This is her contact info. I imagine you'll want to interview her." 

"Thank you," Mulder murmured, reaching for the paper. As he took it, his fingers grazed hers, but she didn't even seem to notice. He watched her face carefully, but as she met his gaze her expression revealed nothing at all. 

"Jim already spoke to her this morning," she went on, "and she's expecting a call from you either way." She turned to address Scully. "I could call you when the tox screen comes back, if you'd like," she offered.

"Don't go out of your way, Dr. Dennison," Scully said with what Mulder recognized as a genuine smile. "You've been so helpful. Besides, I doubt we'll be back here till later in the afternoon." 

"Well, if you think you'll be much later than five, give me a call," the blonde woman said, "and I can have someone drop the file off at your hotel. That'll save you a few minutes."

And keep me out of your way, Mulder thought. He was beginning to suspect that Paula had a lot more practice at this kind of thing than he did. Looking at her now, it was hard to believe she was the same woman who'd... Well, best not to go there, he told himself. He folded the paper with Mrs. Plevretes' contact info, and folded it again, and tucked it into his coat pocket.

"Thank you so much," Scully said, still with that smile, and then looked over at Mulder. "Shall we get moving on this?"

"Sure," he said, still watching Paula from the corner of his eye.

"Goodbye, Agents. Good luck," she said.

"Thanks again, Dr. Dennison," Scully answered, gathering up all her papers. "We'll be in touch later." Mulder murmured his assent and edged toward the door. 

He let out a sigh of relief as the door closed behind them. Standing in that office like nothing had ever happened had been far too surreal for his liking. The sharp report of Scully's heels on the tile floor was the most reassuring sound he could imagine.

"You know, she's good," Scully said suddenly. "Very professional." She glanced up at Mulder. "She runs a tight ship. I wonder how she ended up out of the Bureau and in a little backwater like this."

"She grew up here," Mulder answered, and immediately wished he hadn't. "She came back when her father was dying." He silently begged Scully not to ask him anything more.

"Ah," Scully nodded. "And then she met up with the sheriff?"

"I, uh... what?" he stammered, caught by surprise.

"Don't tell me you haven't noticed the way he looks at her," Scully chuckled. She reached over and patted his arm affectionately. "Mulder. Please. Wake up."

His heart sank. If Scully could look at a stranger and read him so easily, how would he ever be safe? He had to put it from his mind, or he would never be able to keep up his facade. Paula, he thought sourly, certainly seemed to have put it from hers.

He took his cell phone and the paper Paula had given him out of his pocket. "C'mon, Scully," he said. "Let's go see what we can find out about Russell Plevretes." 

Chapter Ten

"You mentioned on the phone that it had been a bit of a stressful week for you," Dr. DeMontreaux said conversationally as Denny sat down. "How are you holding up?"

"Pretty well, I guess." As Denny settled into the chair, the dark maroon leather made the funny little low squeaking sound that she always associated with this office now. "All things considered."

"Ah. 'All things considered,' eh?" Dr. DeMontreaux smiled a little. "Let's consider them, then. What's been on your mind?"

"Well, I know what it is mostly, right now. It's that little girl who's missing."

"Yes. I understand that must be very difficult. But you don't deal directly with the police work involved in the search...?"

"No," Denny shook her head. "But you can't get away from it. It's a little town and it seems like everybody knows her. If they were strangers it would be easier." She frowned. "Not easier, but... different, somehow. But we know these people."

Dr. DeMontreaux nodded. "And because it's close to home, it reminds you of your own experience, and that makes it more uncomfortable."

"Exactly." Denny looked up with a wry smile. "I mean, I'm a lot better than I used to be. Did I tell you I used to buy my milk in bottles, because it was too hard to see the missing kids' faces on the sides of the milk cartons?"

"Well, you're facing it now, rather than trying to hide it from yourself, or deny it." Dr. DeMontreaux wrote something quickly on her notepad. "It's much healthier to face it and come to terms with it."

"I know," Denny sighed. "It's almost like something's trying to *make* me face it. I just can't get away from it, what with Jessy missing. People want to ask me about it. Even if they won't say it in so many words, they'll lead the conversation around that way and then sit there with this look on their faces like they're waiting for me to say something nobody's thought of yet. Like they think I'll have an answer, because it happened to me." She shifted uncomfortably in the chair. "Last Sunday after church, a woman I know even asked me..."

Denny paused and took a deep breath. Dr. DeMontreaux looked on expectantly. 

"Well, she writes a column in the Chief. The town paper," Denny went on. "She actually asked me if I'd talk with her, if she could do a little piece on how I'd been... on what happened to me." She laughed mirthlessly. "A human-interest piece, she said. On how I *overcame* it." 

"And how did you handle that?" Dr. DeMontreaux asked. "How did it make you feel?"

"I just told her I'd really rather not. I said it was still difficult for me to talk about. And I felt... I think I was so surprised I didn't know how to feel." She shook her head wonderingly, remembering the surreal feeling of standing in the sun on the front steps of St. Francis, realizing what the woman had wanted. "I mean, she meant well. I've known her since we were kids. I guess that's why she thought she could ask. She has no idea what it's like."

"Yes." Dr. DeMontreaux agreed. "It's very difficult for people who've had no experience like yours to understand."

"They don't want to understand," Denny said vehemently. "Oh, they say they do. Maybe they even believe it. But if you try to show it to them, they're frightened, and they back away. They want to think that when it's over, it's over. That you pick up your life where you left off and that everything's fine. They don't want to find out that you're still screaming inside, somewhere they can't hear. When they find out it's never really over, they're afraid. And they're afraid of you, because you're the one it happened to."

She fell silent, a little surprised at her own outburst. Dr. DeMontreaux waited a moment before speaking.

"And yet," she finally said, "as you've learned, holding it in isn't the answer."

"Well, I'm here, aren't I?" Denny snorted softly, and then glanced down, almost ashamed. "I'm sorry. You know what I mean."

"Yes, I do," the older woman nodded reassuringly. "But to be at peace with yourself, you know you can't save it all for here. That's still a way of trying to compartmentalize it, and keep it separated from the rest of your life." She tapped the end of her pen against the blotter of the desk. "Now, I'm certainly not suggesting that you give that newspaper interview, but we've said this before -- it's important that you try to begin placing trust in others." She looked inquiringly at Denny. "What about your friend Jim? You've told me you feel safer with him than with anyone else."

"I do," Denny said slowly. "I do. But that makes it harder, too, in a way -- because he's the most important. His opinion matters more than anyone else's."

"Start small," Dr. DeMontreaux suggested. "Why, you could even just mention that you come to see me. That's not such a remarkable thing, and it would open the door for more as you feel comfortable with it."

"I... I guess so," Denny mused, and then nodded. "Yes. I think I could do that."

"Don't force yourself," Dr. DeMontreaux said kindly. "You know you tend to be hard on yourself anyway. But I'm sure there are opportunites for you to share. You just have to stop letting them all pass you by. Start using them, little by little, and we'll talk about how that makes you feel." She made another more lengthy notation on her pad, and then looked up at Denny again. "How are you doing with your medication?"

"All right, I think," Denny answered. "I mean, it's only been a few days since we switched it, so you know we can't really say for sure yet."

"Of course. But I know you -- and if it disagreed with you, I know you'd have noticed something already, however minor," Dr. DeMontreaux said, and Denny had to smile a little.

"Occupational hazard of a medical background, I suppose," she said. "I do notice things."

"That's fine, dear. You make my job a little easier," the other woman chuckled, making another brief note. "Now, you had mentioned those FBI agents last week. How did that go?"

"Not bad, after all. Actually, they're quite a pair." Denny wrinkled her nose a little. "At first I just thought the woman was standoffish, but then I figured out there's something besides work going on between them -- and that the man is a bit of a wolf. I've caught him looking at me like he's imagining what's under my dress. I don't know how she deals with him." She looked up and smiled. "You know, it probably made it a little easier for me, though. Being aggravated at him kept me from feeling sorry for myself that I'm not still in the Bureau too."

"Well, that's good, then," Dr. DeMontreaux said, setting down her pen and leaning back from her desk. "I think you're learning that you're stronger than you believed you were. Why, a year ago you would have been much more likely to let all these things gang up on you and make you very upset. I'm so pleased with your progress. Aren't you?"

"I guess so," Denny answered, and then added more decisively, "Yes. I am."

"Good for you! You can give yourself a big pat on the back," the older woman smiled. "Was there anything else on your mind before we finish?"

Denny thought for a moment. "No, not really. There was a lot going on, but the whole week wasn't as scary as I thought it would be."

"All right, then," Dr. DeMontreaux said confidently, standing up behind the desk. "And next week you'll come and tell me how well it went when you found a way to open up a little with your friend Jim."

"Positive thinking," Denny chuckled, rising from the squeaky leather chair. 

"Yes, indeed," the therapist said as she walked Denny to the door. "We both know it works. Now you have a wonderful week."

"Thanks. You too," Denny said. "I'll see you next week."

Chapter Eleven

"Mulder." Scully, standing in the hotel hallway outside Mulder's room, tapped again at the door. "Mulder?"

It was late; he should be there. She frowned and pressed her ear to the smooth wood of the door. She couldn't hear anything inside. She had expected at least the low murmur of the muted television that seemed to be his favorite brand of white noise; she had come to think of it almost as the soundtrack to the long years of hotel rooms they'd stayed in.

Scully straightened up again and studied the door, her frown deepening. It was the second time since they'd been here that she hadn't been able to find him. Even after all these years, she was still never quite sure how to feel when he dropped out of sight like this. Part of her wanted to huff back to her room and luxuriate in self-righteous indignation at being left to pore alone over the information they'd gathered during the day, but she could never quite shake off the little voice of worry that insisted he might have gotten himself into some kind of trouble again.

She sighed and turned back across the hall to her own room. Once inside, she sat down at the little desk in front of the window, fingering the pages of the yellow legal pad there, not really seeing the notes she'd taken. She reached out and picked up her cell phone, but her finger paused above that speed-dial key, and she eyed the phone speculatively. It was a touchy situation. She didn't want him to think she was keeping tabs on him. *She* didn't want to think she was keeping tabs on him. The ice had just melted from that little unannounced excursion of his three weeks ago.

Maybe, she thought now, she had been a little hard on him over that. She'd been surprised at the vehemence of her own feelings. When he'd reappeared in the office on the third morning as if nothing had happened, she had given full vent to her anger. The wide-eyed, blinking uncomprehension on his face had only spurred her on. The way she had slammed the door as she left the office had felt ludicrously satisfying.

Mulder had been wary around her for days afterward. He had cringed apologetically at the outer edges of her personal space like a dog that had been kicked. He hadn't even dared to escort her with the familiar hand at the small of her back until the first morning they'd been here, walking down the hallway toward the medical examiner's office.

Scully shook her head and pressed the key to dial Mulder's cell phone. She would tell him she was sorry for that outburst. She knew him better by now than to think he'd purposefully done it to hurt her. Cradling the phone between her shoulder and her ear, she began gathering up the papers on the desk; she found herself smiling a little, waiting to hear his voice.

Her smile faded as the phone rang on unanswered, and vanished when the recorded voice clicked on to tell her that the customer she was calling was out of range, or had turned off the phone. She pressed the dial key and carefully dialed the number herself, one digit at a time, but the same thing happened. Hesitantly, she turned the phone back to standby and set it down. 

She peered out the window and saw that their rented Taurus was still in the place they'd left it. While she was wondering what to do, the headlights of a vehicle turning into the driveway two stories below caught her eye. It seemed familiar, and she looked at it more carefully; as it pulled up under the front lights of the hotel she saw that it was a grey Jeep Cherokee, like the one she'd seen that Dr. Dennison driving yesterday. And after the Jeep had drawn to a halt, the passenger-side door, the one nearest her view, opened, and Mulder stepped out.

Scully's eyes widened. She reached over and fumbled with the switch of the lamp, turning out the light so she couldn't be seen. She rose slowly, unconsciously, to her feet, watching transfixed as Mulder walked around the front of the Jeep and leaned down to the driver's window. She watched him saying something, smiling; her mouth dropped open in astonishment as she saw a graceful, feminine hand reach out of the window to touch his cheek and to ruffle his hair. When that hand playfully grasped his tie and drew his head down into the window, out of her line of sight, she gasped aloud.

He stayed there for what seemed like a very long time, and when he drew back and straightened up, he was holding Dr. Dennison's outstretched hand, and as Scully stared he bent his head and kissed the back of that hand before letting it go. Then the Jeep pulled away into the night, and Mulder began to walk toward the front door of the hotel.

Scully sank back into her chair, her own hand pressed to her mouth. No wonder she hadn't been able to find him the other night. No wonder he had seemed so uncomfortable the next morning. He had been -- he had been with... 

She startled to her feet and hurried toward the door. She had already locked it, of course, but now with trembling fingers she fastened the little chain as well. She fled to the bed and hastily turned off the bedside lamp, and hoped that if he couldn't see a sliver of light under her door, he would walk past without knocking.

It must have worked, for the summons never came. She sat for a long time in the dark, staring at the red digits of her travel alarm and wondering how she would be able to pretend that she hadn't seen and didn't know.

--- Continued ---


End file.
